Yet again, on a blisteringly hot summer day, Danny was about to go out in a jacket.

"Sweetie," Maddie began in as innocent a tone as she could, and she immediately saw Danny freeze, his shoulders tensing under the thick green material. "It's going to be really hot out today. Maybe you should leave the jacket…?"

Danny turned a sheepish smile on his mother. She'd come to recognize it lately – it meant he was about to lie. "I'll take it off if I get hot but Sam's driving, and you know how cold she keeps her car."

Maddie forced herself to smile and say "Alright dear, have fun", but once he was out the door her shoulders dropped and the smile fell away. It had been going on for almost four years now. All the lies, the disciplinary actions at school, the slipping grades… he hadn't been able to keep a job for more than a month because he kept messing shifts, and she and Jack never got satisfactory answers for anything. It was only through Jazz's impeccable tutoring that Danny had passed his senior year, and was able to make it into a decent college nearby. Even still Danny had talked about postponing college for a year, but again, never gave a good excuse.

He himself had changed. Along with the normal course of puberty, which granted Danny a height of six foot two, he had begun to bulk up with muscle. She had no idea where it was coming from, so she began to attribute some of Danny's absence as gym training. It was the only way to account for the muscles on her otherwise placid son.

She despondently tweaked at the device in her hands – it was yet another method for tracking ghosts but it was dysfunctional and always tracked Danny on its little grid. Maddie had disassembled and reassembled it time and time again but found nothing wrong with it, and she assumed that by the end of the day she would give up and start from scratch.

The rest of the day, Maddie remained in the lab, even when the news came on with a segment about Phantom and another ghost fighting downtown. It was over before her interest could be aroused, so she had returned to her Locator. Jazz wasn't going to return home for the weekend because of a test and Jack was attending a meeting with the G.I.W., leaving just Maddie and Danny. She'd asked him if he wanted to do something that weekend and he'd given her that lying smile and said sure, if nothing came up. She'd suggested the pool. He had unconsciously clutched his sweater sleeve and said he didn't like the pool. In the end she let it go, saying they'd make it up as they went, and Danny had smiled and gone up to his room.

Maddie had just finished with her seventh reassembly of the ghost tracker when she heard a clatter from upstairs. She checked her watch, which told her it was ten till seven. Danny never got back that early. She hurriedly booted up the device and sure enough, the little ghost graphic popped up on the grid, exactly on top of her coordinates.

Armed with as inconspicuous a gun as she could reach Maddie crept up the stairs, gun cocked and finger on the trigger. The noise had come from the kitchen, which was where the Ecto-Locator was targeting the ghost. She heard drawers being slammed, a chair scraping, and a rustling sound. From one of her belt pouches Maddie produced a compact, flicking it open and poking it around the corner of the hall. Her frame relaxed instantly when she saw Danny's shock of black hair seated at the kitchen table. Damn Locator still didn't work. It was the point of the night for her to give up on it. She padded around the corner, turning the device off and holstering the gun.

"You're back early," she greeted brightly.

Danny started up with a jolt, hitting his shins on the edge of the table. "M-mom," he stammered, his blue eyes wide with fear. Yes, it was the first thing Maddie saw on his face – fear. She had no idea why until she looked down at his exposed arm, which he was trying to roll a sleeve over. "I-I thought you were getting groceries."

If the sight of his arm hadn't been so unsettling Maddie would've reminded him that she went to the store just two days ago. As it was, however, she could not bring herself to say anything. He had rolled the sleeve down but she had seen his arm and he knew she had. He didn't move from his spot, standing before the table and picking anxiously at the end of his sleeve. The Fenton First Aid Kit was open on the table before him, and she had seen why.

She'd seen a lighter green on his arm than the shade of his jacket, but what stood out the most was the red. He had a long gash length-wise down his forearm, and even then she could see it was only half-exposed, a long strip of gauze wound a few times around his elbow. The green sleeve was starting to turn a sickly brown, and Maddie awoke from her shocked stupor.

"Danny," she said in a breathless tone, walking quickly towards him.

He flinched away from her.

She stopped again with her arms outstretched for him, a chilling hurt stabbing through her chest. He still looked frightened. Frightened because he had been caught? With difficulty she allowed her cold scientist side to usurp her motherly side. "Danny let me help you," she implored in a stronger tone.

This did nothing to stop him from staring at her but he did not move, so she approached him and pulled the sleeve up. It was worse than she had seen from across the room but luckily it wasn't deep. "Daniel you need to wash this out before wrapping it," she scolded, but her voice wavered.

"I know," he replied in a very small voice, his eyes now looking away from her. "I was just using the gauze as a tourniquet."

She took a steadying breath and put a gentle hand on his other shoulder, leading him to the sink. She turned the faucet on and he stuck his arm under it, not even wincing as the water stripped the blood away. Danny had made an effective tourniquet. The wound wasn't bleeding very much. She didn't think it would require stitches.

"We need to take the jacket off," she told him, and she felt those alarming muscles tense under her hand. "No excuses," she added quickly.

He unzipped the front of the jacket and slipped one arm out, winding it back around his hand and dabbing at his injury to dry it. With his mother's help he stretched the other armhole wider and carefully shimmied it over the injury. The jacket was dumped unceremoniously into the sink as Maddie led Danny back to the kitchen table to sit. She swiped alcohol pads around it and Danny didn't so much as twitch. When he was just a little boy, falling off his bike or tripping over a crack in the sidewalk, he had pleaded with his mother not to use the alcoholic wipes because it stung. "It's okay now!" he'd say after she'd look at the scraped knee or elbow. "You don't need to touch it, it's better now! Just a Band-Aid!"

But now, having long-since left his childhood behind (farther behind than she could imagine), he sat rigid in his chair as she disinfected the wound. Perhaps more out of curiosity than need she dribbled a little hydrogen peroxide over it. Again no reaction from her son, as if he didn't even feel the nettling foam. He was staring with a horrible intensity at the table. After what seemed to be an eternity she finished wrapping the gauze around his cut, red barely pluming over the surface now. Perhaps she had been wrong about it being that bad of a cut, but all that blood….

She got up off her knees and settled down into the chair beside him, resting her forearms on her thighs and remaining in cold, calculating silence. He refused to move or even look away from the table. He had been wearing a white tank top under the jacket and it was covered in sweat. His arms-

His arms were peppered with scars and bruises, and she could see that they continued under his shirt. There were bruises in multiple stages of healing and scars of all sizes. There were marks she could only conclude were burns. A few extremely faint, jagged white lines marched along his left bicep, marks she could only assume came from amateur stitching. There was, in fact, a cut stitched up on his right shoulder. She had never heard of him going to a doctor any time recently, and then it all hit her like a brick wall. Her son, her son-

"I could've taken care if it myself."

She didn't know what to say. Had it been him that made those uneven stitches? Could her boy, possibly a few years younger, have had to stitch himself up all alone? But why?

"Aren't you going to say something?" he rasped, still looking at the table. Angry – he sounded angry.

"What good is there in saying anything?" she replied in a similar tone. She tried to revert to her usual maternal scolding but she couldn't quite reach it. "You won't tell me the truth."

This, at the very least, drew his attention. His gaze flicked over to hers quickly and she could really see the bags under his eyes. He looked so tired. So much older.

Then he frowned and looked down at his arm, flexing it a little. "So you really aren't going to tell me?" she asked. He didn't look up at her this time.

"Do I have to?"

"Daniel."

"Mom." His voice broke and he cleared his throat. "I… I can't. You wouldn't understand."

"Isn't that a little unfair to me, Daniel?" He chanced another glance up at her but she had no idea what expression she was wearing. She could feel tears welling up, however. "You won't even give me the opportunity to try and understand? What gives you the power to decide for me whether or not I care that my son looks like he's been dragged behind a truck?"

At this the corner of his mouth flickered up in a weak smile. It reminded her of that smile he gave her when he lied, a smile that told her she knew nothing. "I never said you didn't care," he reminded her.

"Daniel, please," she whimpered, losing all control over her tone. "All these lies, your grades, staying out until morning, these injuries… you can't expect me to sit idly by like this and let you do this to yourself. I deserve an explanation. I am your mother and I love you."

At this he lost all good humor in his expression. "Mom, don't do this to me."

She did not respond. She sat completely still and stared at him, her hands balled into fists on her knees.

He looked around him with that same frightened expression she had seen when she caught him in the kitchen. "Tomorrow," he said faintly, rubbing the back of his neck and refusing to meet her gaze. "I'll… I'll tell you tomorrow. Just… give me tonight, okay? …Please?"

It was the closest she had gotten in four years to the truth so the "Alright" passed effortlessly from her lips. He bolted up out of the chair and up the stairs to his room. She knew he would be gone soon. He always managed to sneak out, even from the second story. But she trusted him, despite all the reasons not to. She would wait until tomorrow. Somehow, she would wait.

AN: Hello I am Luna, this is my first fanfiction! I haven't seen Danny Phantom in a while so I hope nothing is too ooc. Any differences can be attributed to the in-universe 3-year gap between the show and this story. This story will have a minimum of 3 chapters.

Edit: Thank you to the guest reviewer who pointed out Danny's height. I assumed he would be very tall because of Jack so I made him as tall as I thought Jack was, without thinking that his shorter mother's genes would have an impact. I have scaled him down to six foot two which is hopefully not too tall still.